November 5, 2014

This is my personal review of Ubuntu 14.10 "Utopic Unicorn" and may/may not reflect real-world analysis and actual usage of the operating system.

To start off, Ubuntu 14.10 is by no means a large update. It doesn't even change the default wallpaper from 14.04. Underneath though, plenty of bugs have been squashed and some minor graphical layouts have been changes. Overall, Ubuntu 14.10 is still a solid platform; let me explain why.

I've been using Ubuntu Linux (on-and-off) since version 7.04 and I have seen many changes from the user interface to the solidity of the platform. Back in those days, it felt that you really needed to tread carefully since every small mistake may result in drastic consequences. Well, those days are rare now, and Canonical has done a great job in providing us a more friendly user experience than every before, functionality-wise. In regard to the user interface, it's changed quite a bit since the introduction of Unity and the changeover from GNOME2/3.

In my case though, I didn't really mind what kind of desktop environment they put in as long as it looked nice and functioned well. Unity provided that- and much more (for tweaking). And so, the first thing I did after installing the system was to configure my desktop to how I wanted it. Gone was the default wallpaper, and in were the custom wallpapers, GTK3 themes and custom desktop icons. Until I was happy, I wasn't letting a single thing escape my grasps.

And so after I customized my desktop, it was time to install updates and necessary software I needed (Google Chrome, FileZilla, GIMP, Steam, Deluge). This was done rather easily from Ubuntu's Software Centre. At first, it was throwing a fit and giving me 403 errors whilst trying to connect to the repository, but Google gave me an answer: change the software sources server location. Thank you, Google.

From my experience so far, I would say that every new version of Ubuntu is more better than the last. Why? Because of continued system updates that fixes bugs whilst introducing new features. Stability is somewhat questionable in some cases (mainly due to my extreme customisation), but for the average user, they shouldn't run into too many problems.

In the end, Ubuntu 14.10 is definitely worth a try and maybe you'll like it?